New York’s Center for Jewish History is opening the David Berg Rare Book Room, which will feature, amongst others, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, and Emma Lazarus.

A Vermont man has pleaded guilty to stealing (and selling) a number of Robert Frost’s personal papers, which he ran across when a desk containing the papers was donated to the nonprofit where he works. The fine is a whopping one hundred dollars.

The French government approved a law yesterday that will prevent Amazon from shipping discounted books for free. The measure is designed to protect embattled independent bookstores.

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Alexandra Socarides of The Los Angeles Review of Books’s has a lovely and informative piece on “New Colossus,” the Petrarchan Emma Lazarus sonnet that famously adorns the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. We learn about the poet and the poem’s formal and political import; Socarides frames “New Colossus” as a bold statement for immigrant reform and tolerance, Lazarus herself as an engaging figure worthy of study.

My own history with the iconic poem is less exalted. I remember distinctly the first time I heard it: I was three years old, in bed with one of the migraines that had arrived with the news of my mother’s pregnancy with a new brother. My father read me the poem, his voice choked with emotion, explaining that it had heralded my great-grandparents’ arrival in New York. Then he left me to sleep, drugged with pain and the red liquid children’s Tylenol that always stained the sheets.

When I woke up a few hours later, cautiously better, the words were still in my head. “Yearning to breathe free …” I thought.

I wandered into the other room, where my parents were sitting on the bed with my new baby brother, hideous and red-haired. My father was making a videotape with his Betamax camera, not that the baby was doing anything interesting. I casually stripped off my cotton underpants, lay down on the bed, and began kicking my legs in the air.